Watch Sparkling Cyanide For Free

Very Cool!!!

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

After watching this 2003 version of "Sparkling Cyanide", I dug up and watched parts of the 1983 version, to see how closely the stories resembled each other; taking into account the updated computer technology, the CCTV footage, etc. they're very close. Anyone who has not read the book and not seen the earlier adaptation will probably be surprised by the plot turns here. The direction lacks style and atmosphere, and the film often plays like a plodding police procedural that could be an extended episode of a TV series, but Christie's story is enough to pull you through. Besides, having two grandparents as the detectives is an unusual concept for a Christie film; Oliver Ford Davies and Pauline Collins make for agreeable leads. And Chloe Howman (Iris) is gorgeous from head to toe; her character has been changed to a fitness trainer, and with a body like that, you can believe it! **1/2 out of 4.

Sparkling Cyanide is a very good story if perhaps not one of Agatha Christie's masterpieces. The 1983 film is dated but there is something enjoyable about it, and while not necessarily a good adaptation The Yellow Iris Poirot mystery was interesting. This modern-day adaptation does look good and while both have given far better performances Oliver Ford-Davies and Pauline Collins try hard, but on the whole is very disappointing. And this is not just as an adaptation, where it is lacking both in detail and spirit to the book, this is on its own terms as well. The rest of the acting is poor(even from a talented actor like Kenneth Cranham who ends up overdoing his gruff patriarch role), nobody really being able to give credibility to their sketchily-written characters, Rosemary faring worst. The script is also very clunky, and the story is often confused, dragged out and flabby with things vaguely mentioned but rarely elaborated upon. The pace just drags with little momentum, I know most Agatha Christie adaptations and books unfold slowly but in a modern setting this approach just doesn't work, and the solution is largely unsatisfying with at least two things that don't make that much sense(that I can't mention really without spoiling it for people). So overall, a modern day Agatha Christie adaptation but without the sparkle. 3/10 Bethany Cox

Dreadful, slow, flabby, "modern" updating of Agatha Christie's novel. The entire story could have been over and done with in under an hour, but this bloated modern monstrosity drags on for over two.The problem with "updating" the storyline into the modern idiom of footballers and self-made men is that the social structure in which the original story was written has no modern equivalent. So there is no hook upon which to hang the theme.Oliver Ford-Davies and Pauline Collins drift around in the middle of this background-less mess and there is a lot of vague talk about spies and Berlin and Cambridge. I was uncertain at one point exactly what I was watching, a bad Agatha Christie or an even worse John Le Carre. With a script that makes little sense, and the addition of a cloyingly annoying grandchild, this is truly flat champagne.

"Sparkling Cyanide" is one of my favourite Agatha Christie novels. So you can imagine my delight when I heard of a new film of it, starring Oliver Ford-Davis. But, alas, this does no-where near justice to the original book. They've kept about two names the same (Lucilla, Iris), added about 10 new characters, and changed most of the original characters around to fit a modern-day setting. The detectives are two elderly MI5 agents (compare that to the respectable retired colonel in the book), it just doesn't work, investigating the murder of an uneducated footballer's wife at a nightclub (compare that to the glamorous wife of a successful businessman who dies at a high-class resteraunt in the book). The solution isn't really explained at all, the interval of two years is clumsily merged into two weeks, and Rosemary Barton is portrayed as a wrist-slitting slut, a tragic loss of one of Agatha Christie's most beautiful descriptions. The only member of the cast who can act is Oliver Ford-Davis, whose talent is pointlessly wasted. Perhaps this film was meant to appeal to the younger generation. It doesn't. I represent the younger generation, this isn't right. If you've never heard of Agatha Christie before, and like things on the TV like "Silent Witness", I suppose this is aimed at you. But you won't like it. If you're a die-hard Agatha Christie fan, like me, follow the advice of Rosalind Hicks, her daughter, who hates the film, and "stick to the book".